ABSTRACT
The backlash against feminism evident in Australia during the late 1980s and early 1990s arises out of national economic recession and workplace restructuring. I argue that educational restructuring has itself become a form of backlash, in that the discourses of efficiency and effectiveness shaping the radical restructuring of higher education in Australia since 1987 have silenced earlier discourses of equity. This chapter considers two dynamically interrelated aspects of the backlash in higher education: (1) the discourses that constitute the Australian media representation of backlash (with particular reference to case of alleged sexual harassment at an Australian university), and (2) the rapidly changing material conditions of academic work (particularly as they affect women), and their implications for feminist pedagogy.
